A team of moth and butterfly scientists decided to go from a restaurant bar to the lab bench to understand mescal's iconic “worm”
Scientific inspiration can strike anywhere—even at a restaurant bar in Oaxaca, Mexico. That’s where a team of insect researchers decided to use DNA sequencing to identify what larva lurks in bottles of the nation’s iconic alcohol, mescal.
And in an analysis of nearly two dozen bottles of alcohol, the scientists determined that all of the mescal “worms” they tested belonged to a single species of moth, according to their study, which was published on March 8 in PeerJ.
Some scientists who were not involved in the paper have found its discovery predictable. “The results are hardly surprising,” said Ricardo Castro-Torres, an entomologist at Postgraduate College in Mexico, in an e-mail to Scientific American. “In my opinion, there really is a consensus about what species is included in mescal bottles.”
For the new study, Kawahara and his colleagues gathered 21 bottles of mescal from 18 different manufacturers, pouring each bottle through a sieve to snag the “worm.”
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